The Bard, Four Centuries Past
[guest post by JVW]
William Shakespeare died 400 years ago today. There are any number of commemoratives events taking place across The Globe*, including President Obama’s visit to England where he saw a “cribbed” piece of Hamlet. Pity he didn’t hear words from Henry IV (“There’s neither honesty, manhood, or good fellowship in thee”) or from the sonnets (“I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought/And with old woes new wail my dear times’ waste”). His influence endures four centuries later in many of the everyday English language phrases we use to the recycling of Shakespearean plots into modern movies and television.
It’s long been a complaint among many cultural conservatives that Shakespeare has disappeared from modern education. Last year, we discussed an op-ed written by a California teacher arguing that the Bard’s words were no longer relevant to teenagers. Fortunately, the general consensus from that debate across the entire English-speaking world appeared to be opposed to sidelining Prince Hamlet, the Capulets & Montagues, Iago, and Miss Kate Minola. While a newly-hired literature professor these days is more likely to have written a dissertation on lesbian poets of the Andean Mountains than on the symbolism of the witches in Macbeth**, I think that most colleges and universities still teach a course on Elizabethan authors, if not on William Shakespeare himself. This one is from my alma mater:
Shakespeare: Global Shakespeares
Global Shakespeares approaches some of the playwright’s most enduring works through their vibrant and varied afterlife. We will focus on four or five plays, drawn from different genres, including Hamlet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and The Tempest. Close reading of the texts will accompany examining how they have been adapted and performed around the world, on film, and in theater. Students will reflect upon how adapting the plays in different ways and for different contexts changes our understanding of their cultural impact. We may also attend one or more theatrical performances, depending on what is available in the Boston area during the semester.
I note too that the high school in my neighborhood covers British Literature in 12th grade English and the Honors and Advanced Placement English courses mention assigning “classic” literature, so I feel safe in guessing that Shakespeare is covered in those courses.
Consider this an open thread on celebrating William Shakespeare. Do you have a favorite work of his? Does your college or your kids’ college still have a course on him? Does your local high school still assign his plays and sonnets? Given the many distractions that we now have at our fingertips, it is remarkable that his work has been so influential for so long.
– JVW
* See what I did there?
** Years ago I knew a woman whose boyfriend was working on a PhD at Harvard. His crusty old-school advisor supposedly sat him down and said to him, “You are a straight white male writing a dissertation on Shakespeare; you have zero chance of a faculty appointment at any decent university.” Indeed, he ended up teaching at a private high school.
I think my favorite Shakespeare play is Julius Caesar. We read it in 9th or 10th grade. There is a really great cartoon version of the play (of all things). You can find it here, as part of the Animated Shakespeare Series.
JVW (9e3c77) — 4/23/2016 @ 2:09 pmMy Shakespeare studies were in high school and, at most, one or two classes in college. I liked reading some works more than others but they were all worthwhile because they made me think and study. I feel sorry for anyone who has never read any of Shakespeare’s works.
DRJ (15874d) — 4/23/2016 @ 2:35 pmAs Dennis Prager often mentions with incredulity, you can graduate from UCLA with a degree in Literature without reading Shakespeare.
Cruz Supporter (102c9a) — 4/23/2016 @ 2:42 pmIn sophomore year of high school, I took a Shakespeare class where we read Hamlet, Richard III, and Romeo and Juliet. All great works.
But he was a white male. And a secret Catholic.
Cruz Supporter (102c9a) — 4/23/2016 @ 3:00 pmSo we should jettison him, and read essays by Margaret Cho, instead.
There are some interesting Youtube videos on original pronunciation of Shakespeare, helps with some of the (to us moderns) hidden wordplay. Worth watching to any fans of the Bard.
Teflon Dad (154dc0) — 4/23/2016 @ 3:53 pmThank you for this post, JVW.
In an age where 140 characters or less reigns, it’s tough to see how young people growing up wired on linguistic shorthand and byte sized pieces of information could possibly have the curiosity, let alone patience to delve into Shakespeare.
It certainly is too bad he’s was an old white guy, at least according to this high school teacher who complained about the Bard last year in the Wapo:
But the real reason this teacher resents teaching Shakespeare?
Dana (0ee61a) — 4/23/2016 @ 4:32 pmDana, that teacher is both lazy and promoting a world view.
Not everyone agrees. I would never assume that “ethnically diverse” “modern-day” students who are “wonderfully curious” could not understand the Bard. And there are many productions of the Bard that are, um, not white.
Lazy. Check it out:
http://innercityshakespeare.org/
I think that some ethnocrats want to put kids into nice boxes, telling them what to think and believe. In other words, doing the very things about which they complain.
Simon Jester (28b37e) — 4/23/2016 @ 4:50 pmDana, I don’t believe you appreciate the effort that people like that teacher and her colleagues in American universities put forth to deconstruct Western Civilization. Just look at the Herculean (pardon the micro aggression of reference to classic Greek mythology) effort Obama has expelled to fundamentally change our sick, racist culture.
Hoagie ™ (e4fcd6) — 4/23/2016 @ 5:08 pm“my very ethnically-diverse and wonderfully curious modern-day students”
Exposure to the story of Desdemona, Iago and Othello couldn’t possibly be of interest to such an eclectic group.
Rick Ballard (4bc02f) — 4/23/2016 @ 5:13 pmReady Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World currently.
SPQR (a3a747) — 4/23/2016 @ 5:14 pmReading
SPQR (a3a747) — 4/23/2016 @ 5:14 pmI have, and read, all of Shakespeare’s works. (Including the sonnets, for my sins.) Many more than once. I have seen many of them performed too, some more than once, including the worst rendition of Hamlet ever by Mel Gibson.
In terms of structure, he is to the Greeks what the Space Shuttle is to Kitty Hawk. Measure For Measure contains everything you ever need to know about dramatic irony. Titus Andronicus may contain the first recorded Yo Mama joke in the the English language. And that’s it — language — no writer in English comes near him. He is to the English language what George Washington is to America.
His works are hard to rank. They’re plays and the performance counts just as much as plot and dialogue. And de gustibus — which heart-strings do you like tugged, what butters your parsnips? I recommend Measure For Measure to everybody, unconditionally. Hamlet and Othello, you’ve got to see them/read them back to back for a synergistic effect that squares their profundity. You won’t be missing very much if you skip Titus Andronicus; but Coriolanus is worth your time — especially during election season. 😉
nk (dbc370) — 4/23/2016 @ 5:22 pmHere’s Sheriff Andy Taylor’s quick breakfast synopsis of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ to Opie.
He explains that a soliloquy is when a person used to stand and talk to themself, but that if you try that nowadays, you’ll be taken away.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ACx8vBuZek
Cruz Supporter (102c9a) — 4/23/2016 @ 5:33 pmBTW, contrary to bi-coastal propaganda and fly-over simple-mindedness, West Side Story is not, repeat NOT, Romeo and Juliet. West Side Story is Big Mac to Romeo and Juliet’s chateaubriand. Tony and Maria were doing the right thing, putting aside prejudice for love and trying their best to get out of that Dystopia. They could only better their situation. Romeo and Juliet, the prince and princess heirs of their respective families, could only worsen their situation, throwing away everything, and bringing tragedy on themselves and those close to them for the satisfaction of teenage hormonal urgings. Much more of everything in Romeo and Juliet. Not that West Side story is not fun when you’ve had enough of the Marx Brothers marathon. And I can pass for Puerto Rican, just like George Chakiris, I’ve found. Or maybe because of George Chakiris — I just thought of that.
nk (dbc370) — 4/23/2016 @ 5:43 pmMy first (and last) great English teacher was Mrs. English (BA Berkeley) who was taken from us by a head on crash in Mojave during the Christmas break in 1962-63. I can still remember a few of her acerbic comments on my attempts at essays, and one much treasured, never to be forgotten compliment. We were just getting into Shakespeare at the end of that first semester when she was taken from us. I wish I could remember the play, but her comment to me will never be forgotten: “MR. STEWART! GET YOUR MIND ABOVE YOUR BELT!”
Suggestions as to the title of the play would be appreciated.
BobStewartatHome (404986) — 4/23/2016 @ 6:20 pmAll of Shakespeare’s plays that I can think of have sex in them, Bob, and most, including the tragedies, coarse jokes and/or coarse descriptions of sex. Got any more hints?
nk (dbc370) — 4/23/2016 @ 6:28 pmI love Hamlet, Macbeth,and Romeo and Juliet. I don’t quite understand the heavier ones and would love to take a course. My alma mater still has a Shakespeare Society, dedicated to all things Shakespeare! I’m surprised the multicultis have not run them out of town yet.
I think of Obama as Hamlet. Except for his glorious language, Hamlet himself was a fool, surpassed only by Polonius, who I guess would be Biden today.
Patricia (5fc097) — 4/23/2016 @ 6:34 pmAlso love Henry V, “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.”
When I hear our self-styled king muttering about a “sh** storm” I imagine Will rolling in his grave.
Patricia (5fc097) — 4/23/2016 @ 6:36 pmwell there’s a reason for that, shakespeare focused on power and love and loss, and language,
narciso (732bc0) — 4/23/2016 @ 6:38 pmsome sources he relied on like merton, were clearly tudor propaganda, holinshed less so,
The city of Verona is a wonderful place to take your better half. “The balcony”
mg (31009b) — 4/23/2016 @ 6:43 pmCould be my favorite city on earth.
All four of my kids have amateur theater experience, and although none’s yet done a Shakespeare play, we’ve seen several together. The most notable among them being a production by Houston’s Alley Theater probably eight or ten years ago of the Scottish Play, with the sets and costumes following a modern paramilitary (think body armor & assault rifles) theme, which worked surprisingly well in getting teens to pay attention.
Beldar (fa637a) — 4/23/2016 @ 6:46 pmnk, sadly I cannot. But my antennae was properly tuned to such things in those days, even in an archaic English, and I expect that Mrs. English had anticipated my smirk (or whatever) and pounced.
BobStewartatHome (404986) — 4/23/2016 @ 6:47 pmMy uncle was an English professor at BYU in the 1960s and 1970s. He took a sabbatical one year to bone up on Shakespeare. He said Shakespeare was the greatest writer ever. I treasure the fat, red, complete works of Shakespeare (David Bevington-edited) book he gave me. I was the lucky beneficiary of many one-on-one lessons in his house when I was attending BYU myself. (My uncle was retired by then.)
He had a great sense of humor. One of my relatives mentioned to my uncle that she had gotten “an A out of Shakespeare”. He told her that was pretty good considering he had been dead for 400 years. That joke is spot-on today!
Incidentally, my uncle was a liberal Democrat, which I can forgive him for considering the stifling culture of the area at the time. Anyway, Mitt Romney was a student of my uncle’s. My uncle said he was a bright student.
norcal (361442) — 4/23/2016 @ 6:50 pmIf Hamlet had been Othello, there would have been no play. The minute his father’s ghost tells him how he was murdered, Othello goes and knifes his step-father and likely his mother, end of story. If Hamlet had been Othello, he would have dithered and hesitated and hesitated and dithered until it came out that Iago was making it all up. No harm, no foul. Hamlet would have been very wise in Venice and Othello the same in Denmark. “Wrong personality for the situation” formula for a tragedy; with a touch of a man’s character is his fate.
nk (dbc370) — 4/23/2016 @ 6:50 pmwell othello, was a military man, any semblance that he was being visited by ghosts, would cut short his career, iago, did basically do such a thing,
narciso (732bc0) — 4/23/2016 @ 7:01 pmTo put things in perspective, my English class was considered an “Honors” class, as were several other classes I took. They were the best that my high school offered. I coached in public schools between 1980 and 2009, and the equivalent classes were called “AP” classes, as they presumably prepared their students for the Advanced Placement tests which would enhance their college applications, and perhaps allow them to take higher level classes without need of the a Freshman level prerequisite. My volleyball players were usually members of the school’s Honor Society, and they routinely took the advance placement courses. In the mid 2000s, I was astonished to see some of my players coloring the pages in a “Canterbury Tales” coloring book in between matches at a Saturday tournament. These young women were serious students who wouldn’t waste time. So I had to ask them what they were doing. It turned out the three or four Juniors were taking an AP English class, and this was their first big homework assignment! Later I asked some of our parents who were chaperoning or serving as trainers (they were licensed Physical Therapists) and they confirmed that their daughters were taking AP English, and in their view the teacher was absolutely first rate.
How time flies.
BobStewartatHome (404986) — 4/23/2016 @ 7:03 pmSince Julius Caesar and Henry V have both been mentioned, anyone who is anywhere near the Shenandoah Valley should know that they are both playing right now at the Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton, VA. They’re one of the best Shakespeare companies in the world, and play in the only reproduction of Shakespeare’s indoor theater. (There are a dozen or more Globes in the world today, but only one Blackfriars.) Eleven actors are putting on both of those plays, plus two modern ones (The Importance of Being Earnest and Shaw’s Arms and the Man) through mid-June – in repertory, so you can see all four in a weekend. They don’t do original pronunciation, but they do do ‘original practices’: lights stay on, there are no sets, just chairs and such brought on for a scene and then taken right off, some audience members sit on stools on stage, the trapdoor and balcony are used as appropriate, and so on. Their site is here. Note: I am not associated with the ASC except as a very satisfied customer.
Dr. Weevil (1dc6de) — 4/23/2016 @ 7:08 pmHillsdale’s online course offerings include “Great Books 102” with a lecture titled:
It is nicely done.
BobStewartatHome (404986) — 4/23/2016 @ 7:12 pmOne measure of Shakespeare’s greatness is the number of adaptations of his works into other languages.
For instance, Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet, Verdi’s Falstaff and Otello, Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (based on Macbeth), and Berlioz’s Béatrice et Bénédict (based on Much Ado About Nothing).
Rich Rostrom (d2c6fd) — 4/23/2016 @ 10:32 pm@JVW: the recycling of Shakespearean plots into modern movies and television.
Shakespeare himself recycled those plots; I doubt he ever came up with a plot himself. His signature move was to combine plots from two or three different works, and generally something that had just been in theaters not long before.
Which is better than what we have today, where every action movie has essentially the same plot.
Anyway, my favorite Shakespeare play is Henry V.
Gabriel Hanna (98a034) — 4/24/2016 @ 7:43 amJVW, I followed the link to your alma mater’s catalogue of lit courses. I would totally be excited to take “Problems in Cultural Interpretations; Reading Cookbooks.”
Cruz Supporter (102c9a) — 4/24/2016 @ 7:56 amI have a feeling that students will be taught that characterizing tacos and enchiladas as “Mexican” food is nothing less than cultural hegemony.
JVW, I followed the link to your alma mater’s catalogue of lit courses. I would totally be excited to take “Problems in Cultural Interpretations; Reading Cookbooks.”
Ugh, that course is taught by the same professor who teaches “Major Novels: Well Behaved Women Seldom Make History,” so I guess we have an academic home for crybullies on campus, though to be fair it looks like the reading list is Moll Flanders, Tess of the D’Ubervilles, Austen, Bronte, Eliot, and other ancient white women writers.
JVW (eabb2a) — 4/24/2016 @ 1:27 pmThe American education establishment is organized child abuse. It teaches failure. Indeed, it teaches that traits that lead to success, such as showing up on time or speaking well, constitute “acting white” and therefore only a racist would value those traits.
And America is a racist country of course.
So, the teachers teach their students to fail. And, when they fail, to chalk it up to “white privilege.”
It’s a strange form of “white privilege” doncha think when non-whites get more of it?
http://gbtimes.com/china/80-columbia-masters-graduates-statistics-are-chinese
Cognitive dissonance isn’t my native tongue, so I may not be able to articulate the language of “privilege” as developed by the gender and ethnic grievance studies perfessers.
If you read your kid bed time stories you are “privileging” your child, and you should feel like a piece of dung. Because a single black mom in the hood isn’t doing it. And she’s not doing it because her mind was poisoned to believe that would be “acting white.”
There are actually people spending entire academic careers, I sh*t you not, getting their panties all bunched up over this. If some high school dropout(that’d be one of their successes, by the way) isn’t doing it for their kid, you shouldn’t be doing it for yours. Because that’s “privilege.”
There is a growing body of research that shows inner city black kids and suburban white kids score evenly on reading tests early on. It’s later when the scores start to diverge. Because if you’re reading Dick-and-Jane type primers there’s no subject matter so to speak. But later you in addition to new words you actually have to know something about what you are reading.
We’ve all been there. Who didn’t sat in class listening to someone sounding out Jew-Lee-Us-Sieze-Her or Nap-O-Lee-On-Bone-a-part. Or something like it. But “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go.”
The bottom line is if I had to I could move to Shanghai and teach English. Your average Mizzou #BlackLivesMatter protester ten years in to a five year graduate degree on Marxist-Leninist perspectives on Korean grocers invading the black space can not.
Steve57 (4bd90d) — 4/25/2016 @ 9:23 amIn case it wasn’t obvious, my point was that Shanghai must be a hotbed of seething racist white supremacy.
Because the residents aren’t lining up to pay cash money to some guy who shows up 45 minutes late to lecture them about burning down a CVS pharmacy for jobs.
Steve57 (4bd90d) — 4/25/2016 @ 9:33 amA good friend of mine from my Navy days was prior enlisted. Army. A Green Beret who got tired of being cold and hungry and more than a thousand feet from a pot of coffee. It’s a young man’s game and as much as we hate to admit it we aren’t as young as we used to be.
So while I’m not a Green Beret I know what they do. Actually I’d know what they do without the personal connection but I’m just throwing it out there for effect. One of their main missions is to train and lead foreign unconventional forces.
If you’ve been in a coma you’ll have missed the fact that the libs are rabid over the fact that SPECOPS/SPECWAR is a a white man’s fiefdom. We need to redistribute that.
The thing is, though, this cadre of xtofascist imperialist cisgendered eurocentric white patriarchal anachronisms can fit in with any stone age culture they need to blend in with.
Meanwhile their critics are out of place if they leave the confines of Oberlin college or their occupation camp on Wall Street.
And they can’t make the Bard accessible to inner city youth.
Maybe we need to fire their worthless @$$es and hire people like me. I can teach them to appreciate Shakespeare while I’m instructing them on the finer points of the Mossberg 590 or the Benelli M4.
Steve57 (4bd90d) — 4/25/2016 @ 11:22 amMatt was a funny guy. The uniform of the day at NMITC was Summer whites because, it was summer. wouldn’t shut up about the fact he hated it because of the IR signature.
Finally we had to voxsplain him that if we were ever stupid enough to be running around in the jungle in our Summer Whites to please, in the name of all that’s holy and good, shoot us.
Like we’re going to wake up one day in a green hell and look into our closet and choose the ice cream suit so we can melt into the background.
Steve57 (4bd90d) — 4/25/2016 @ 11:40 am